Tag: Healthy Eating

How is everyone doing this week?! I was pretty busy this week and super thankful for my meal prep! It really helped keep things less stressful. That said, it wasn’t an easy week and I’m sharing some about that on here towards the end of today’s post. but first couple quick announcements!

Announcements

If you’ve followed my journey for little while, you’ve seen how much I love the Gixo app! It’s one of my favorite ways to workout and it’s getting better all the time! They are constantly improving it and adding new classes. And you can try it for free for 30 days! And if you use my link to do it, I get a little something extra if you decide you love it as much as I do and sign-up! Check it out here!

Second announcement is mostly for Iowa locals – I’ve created a Facebook group and page for my POUND classes and events! Right now it just shows my YMCA classes, but there are more events in the works! Plus I have some fun ideas for the group that I can’t wait to put in motion. So I would love it if you join me on there! Check out the group here and the page here!

Meal Prep

This week I tried to keep things super simple since I had a weekend market to handle along with meal prep. Everything turned out delicious!

Protein Balls – Draz has a couple of these each day at work and I usually grab them between jobs. They are the perfect snack when I’m on the go, which is most of the time!

Workouts

This week I only got in 3 days of workouts. I was hoping for more, but at least the workouts I got in were pretty great! 2 days of POUND class and practice and one day of bike riding with Draz! We went on a nearly 20-mile ride and it was wonderful!

Struggles

Now for the part I’ve been struggling with (pardon the pun)….My goal is to always be honest on here and not make it seem like things are better than they are. But how honest? So, I’m just going to lay it out here. Maybe it will strike a cord with you.

In many ways, this was a good week. First market of the season went well, some exciting things are happening. I got in some workouts, didn’t get sick, etc….But depression doesn’t care if you SHOULD be having a good week. Most of the week I felt creatively and emotionally drained, more than a little down and just de-motivated. During this time, I made a couple really bad eating choices, but I’m trying not to feel too bad about them. A couple of days of bad eating don’t mean I’m failing, just that I stumbled a bit.

Thankfully, this was not a serious bout of depression. In some ways, I struggle to even name it depression, because I’ve suffered much worse and much longer bouts in years past. But that is really the only thing I can call it. I seem to be coming out of it now and my energy is coming back a bit. I’m still struggling with motivation and focus, but I think I’m past the worst of it for now.

A bit about Depression

I went back and forth with whether I should share this one here, but I think it’s important to acknowledge. Sometimes we just feel bad. There doesn’t have to be a reason that we can point to, some event that MADE us feel that way. Everything could be going wonderfully and we still feel horrible. Sometimes, like this bout, these feelings don’t last for long. Other times, they may. You may even need help in dealing with them, either through therapy or medication.

I’ve used both in the past and I’m pretty sure they saved my life.

The point of me sharing this on here? I want to encourage all of you to give yourself some understanding and compassion if you need it. And, even more importantly, if you need help in dealing with your depression (or something else), please get it. There is no shame in getting help, no shame in taking medication.

To find somewhere in your area to get help, you can go to this website.

Hey everyone! This week’s meal prep is a little bit of a change. Lately I have been focused on quick meal prep with lots of protein and a higher fat content too. My work schedule has been crazy lately and I have found that some extra protein and a bit more fat has been really helping my energy levels. This week’s meal prep also brings an extra treat for us – venison! A friend of mine had some extra and so the casserole we had this week had delicious venison in it!

Enjoy!

To get things started off, this week’s snacks included protein balls, banana roll-ups, and turkey roll-ups (recipe coming soon!) I also made a batch of breakfast burritos, which are a staple around here.

used fiesta blend seasoning instead of cheddar, but that was mostly just because that is what I had on hand

Our other main dish for the week was Slow Cooker Mongolian Chicken. Now, I usually use chopped broccoli in this, but I actually forgot my bag with the broccoli in it at the grocery store haha! But it still was wonderful and as flavorful as always.

That’s it for this week! Want to try it yourself? Get your grocery list here!

I’m so excited to be back on here, sharing my weekly meal prep with you all! I can’t even tell you how much I’ve missed this the last few months! To be honest, my eating towards the end of market season left something to be desired. I was still prepping, but I was impulse eating more and not planning as well for meals at markets by the end of it. I am so excited to get my food back on track and using meal prep to do it!

This week’s meal prep is a bit smaller than you are probably used to. While I was getting ready for market season, I prepped extra for the freezer to make things a bit easier. It was such a huge help! But we do have some of the extra prep left over, so we have been using that for part of our meals to get it used up!

I am super excited to share this week’s meal prep dish with you though! It’s a new dish to us: Healthy Broccoli Chicken Casserole! I love getting recipes from Slim Sanity and this one was no exception! I love the flavor in this casserole. The only thing I would change up was likely my own fault. It was a bit dry, but I’m pretty sure that is due to me increasing the amount of chicken, rice and broccoli without increasing the “sauce” enough. I will definitely be making this one again, with some minor tweaks!

I did make some changes to the original recipe. All the ingredients are basically the same, but I didn’t really measure much of the main components for the casserole. Here is what I used:

3 large broccoli heads (roughly 4-5 cups chopped)

roughly 1 1/2 lbs chicken, shredded.

roughly 1 1/2-2 c jasmine rice (thawed from frozen)

1/2 c unsweetened plain almond milk

1/2 c shredded Italian blend cheese (in place of Mozzarella)

1/2 c shredded Fiesta blend cheese (in place of cheddar)

Most of these changes were based on just what we had around the house, like the cheese. I had frozen the chicken and rice (separately) before and I’m honestly not quite sure how much there was.

Other items on the prep list: Healthier Cinnamon Bread, Peanut Butter Chocolate Protein Balls and a celery and lunchmeat combo snack! The cinnamon bread remains one of our staple dishes and Draz and I have a slice of it every day! The protein balls are mostly Draz’s, though I’ve been having them between my FT and PT jobs lately to get me through til dinner. As for the combo snack, that is all mine! I’ve been playing with different snacks again for me and this is my most recent one. Not sure if I will stick to it or not, but I’m enjoying it for now!

While the protein balls are loosely based on this recipe, they have changed quite a bit over time! Make sure to keep an eye out, because I plan on writing a recipe post for them soon!

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That’s it for this week’s meal prep! How are you faring with your meal prep post-holidays? I would love to hear your thoughts, so please comment below or shoot me an email!

Hey y’all!! Can you believe it’s September already!? I know I can’t. We are heading towards fall so quickly, and it’s more important than ever to be getting those healthy habits in place. One of those habits for me is meal prep! You all know just how much I depend on meal prep to get through my week and this week was no exception.

In fact, it was even more important this week in many ways! Not only am I taking part in this awesome September fitness challenge, but I have an all weekend market for my jewelry at a local winery. So having all of our food ready to go was the only way I was going to stay on track.

Of course, it worked great! I was able to have a healthy meal and snacks at the market yesterday and have more ready for today. The September challenge started off wonderfully too! (See more details on how you can join in at the bottom of this post)

Enjoy!

I have really been changing up my snacks lately and this week was no exception. Grapes and chunks of grilled chicken are one of my new go-to’s, sometimes with piece of string cheese. Celery with peanut butter are another favorite.

The new one this week – this mock “tuna salad” to use as a dip with some lower calorie crackers! I really like how it turned out, but the recipe stills needs some work. Basically, I combined tuna with cottage cheese, some seasonings and couple other ingredients. Pretty quick and simple, and a great tasty snack!

My dishes included Cauliflower Chowder and Low Carb Burrito Bowls! One thing I love about the burrito bowls is that they are eaten cold. Since I had the market this weekend, I wanted to make sure I had food I could take and eat there easily! This time around, I got pre-packaged avocado and put a container of each in with the rest of the ingredients. I LOVE this method! It worked great and I didn’t have to worry about how well the avocado would hold up throughout the week. I will definitely be doing that again.

You might be noticing that a couple of the containers look a little different than normal. I am testing out a Six Pack Fitness meal bag and those are the containers that go in it! I can’t wait to share my thoughts with you on how they work later on!

For the Cauliflower Chowder, I do a few things different than the recipe. At the end of the cooking, I ladle out a couple of cups of the soup, making sure to get some big chunks of cauliflower. That goes in the blender and is blended until mostly smooth. That goes back into the soup. It really helps thicken it up to the consistency I like! Along with that, I substitute the following ingredients:

grapeseed oil instead of butter

turkey bacon instead of regular bacon

unsweetened almond milk instead of 2%

That’s it for this week’s meal prep! Want to give my main dishes a try? Get your grocery list here!

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Want to join in on the #AssOffTheCouch September fitness challenge?! It’s not too late! Registration doesn’t close until September 5th! Not only is it a great way to get moving more, but there will be tons of awesome prizes! You can register here and you can use the code 7022smus to get 30% off of your registration, making it only $11.90! That is only 0.40 a day to get motivational emails and be a part of an awesome community that will help keep you going!

Have you tried any new snacks lately? What are your favorite healthy snacks? I would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below!

After my trip to Las Vegas, I was definitely ready for a food-reset! Am I the only one who finds it crazy that it was hard to eat healthy during a fitness conference? So when I got back, I knew I wanted to make sure that my meal prep for the coming week were packed with veggies!

Sadly, I didn’t get to enjoy it quite as much as I would have liked, since I ended up spending most of the week fighting off a minor flu. But that is okay! I got to experiment with some new recipes and I was able to save most of the prep that didn’t get eaten. The other plus side: Even while I was sick and had just gotten back home a few days before, I didn’t have to worry at all about what Draz was going to take for lunch or anything like that! Meal prep really can save you so much stress.

Enjoy!

For snacks, I changed things up a bit. Before I left on my trip, I got some really delicious local ground mustard that I love to use as a dip. So I cut up some veggies to have as a snack to go with it! A couple of the days I ended up taking some pretzels to dip in it too. Have you ever used mustard like that? It’s delicious!

For me, I made some burrito bowls inspired by this recipe, some garlic-y zucchini noodles (still working on the recipe for this one) and the One-Pot Cabbage Veggie Saute I shared with you yesterday! Overall, everything turned out great! With me getting sick, I ended up putting a bunch of the cabbage dish in the freezer, so I guess we will get to see how well that recipe freezes!

Ok, so this prep is actually from a couple of weeks ago, before I left for BlogFest and IdeaWorld. Because I was getting ready to leave, I didn’t really get the chance to actually post it! But I really love how this one turned out, so here it is! (Want to read more about the conference? Check out my experienceand thoughts!)

I kept my snacks pretty simple this time around. The sliced chicken and cheese is my current favorite snack and definitely helps tide me over between breakfast and lunch! And the hard-boiled eggs are a great boost for me when I get home from work, before I head to the gym. What is your go-to pre-workout snack? I would love to give it a try!

For Draz’s main dishes, I made two of his favorites: Island-Style Pulled Pork and Freezer-Ready Turkey and Bean Burritos! I made extra burritos, since I was hoping some would be leftover for him to enjoy while I was gone. I will be posting my recipe for these soon, but until then, hereis the recipe that I started out using!

I like a thicker chowder, so I also simmered it a bit longer. And when it was done simmering, I ladled out a few cups worth and blended it, then added it back in. I think it turned out great and will definitely be making this delicious recipe again!

Want to make my dishes for yourself? Here is the grocery list for my main dishes!

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Do you prefer chowder or soup? If you like chowder, how do you thicken yours up? I would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below!

Happy 4th of July weekend everyone! I hope you are all having a lovely weekend! I actually got to celebrate a little for this holiday. My parents came to camp nearby, so I got to spend some time out there with them! It was great to just relax by the fire and chat 🙂

I am super excited to share this week’s meal prep with you all! Not only is it absolutely delicious, but it was really nice to our budget too. Enjoy!

So, in all my crazy distracted-ness, I actually forgot to photograph the snacks from this week’s meal prep. I kept things pretty basic though. Cookie dough protein balls for Draz, chicken lunchmeat and cheese, celery sticks and peanut butter, and a few hard-boiled eggs. These higher protein and fat snacks have been working great for me! If you have any suggestions for high protein snacks you love, I would love to hear about them!

One change I made to the Cabbage Sauteed with Chicken – I doubled the amount of chicken in the recipe. This recipe is originally intended to be side dish. So to make it work better for a main meal, I increased the amount of protein! I didn’t have to change anything else and it worked great with more chicken!

The Burrito Bowls were new and I absolutely loved them! I will admit, I was a little skeptical at first, since part of it calls for cutting up avocado and putting it in the bowls. But the lime did the trick and the avocado held up great throughout the week! For the shredded chicken, I used a variation of her Slow Cooker Mexican Chicken, but subbing out the tomato sauce for 2 cans of diced tomatoes (mostly because I didn’t have any tomato sauce haha). One thing to note for this recipe – it might make things easier to buy the avocados a few days ahead of time so they are ripe. I didn’t plan well for this, so I actually ended up assembling the burrito bowls a day later than the rest of the meal prep. Also, I left out the sour cream, since I’m not a big fan of it.

Here are the macros for this week’s main dishes:

Want to give this menu a try? Get your grocery list here!

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That’s it for me this week! What did you do over your holiday weekend? Did you still do meal prep? I would love to hear from you, so please leave a comment below!

Hey everyone! I am SO excited to bring you this week’s meal prep! So I always tell you that meal prep should work for you. Well, this week I’m showing you the changes that I am making to my meal prep to make it work for me!

You might know that I’ve been using the If It Fits Your Macros method (IIFYM) method for the past few months to try to help my eating stay on track. While I have been loving it, it hasn’t quite been working for me as well as I had hoped. Basically? I was hungry A LOT of the time! I was feeling pretty good when I woke up and I did feel leaner, but I would get hungry between most snacks and meals. And not a little hungry either….REALLY hungry. I tried changing up snacks and meals, but nothing was really helping.

Around this same time, I had come to the realization that I needed some help if I want to get to my fitness goals. So I started looking for a personal trainer (more on that coming soon!) I checked out a lot of wonderful ladies, most of whom you have met here through my Finding Fitness series! When I ended up deciding on Jen from Burpees 4 Breakfast, I knew that I wanted to chat with her about nutrition too.

Jen helped so much and after some conversation, reworked my macros to give me something different to try! She cut down on my carbs and increased my protein and fat intake and I gotta say I’m loving it so far! It’s too soon to see if it will make much of a difference on my fitness progress, but I definitely feel more satiated than I have in quite a while.

So for now at least, my meal preps will be changing to reflect this! I loved this week’s meal prep so much and I really think you will too. Enjoy!

Ok, to get started, snacks. You might notice that I didn’t take my usual photo of my snacks and salads. Well, I’m not going to be making the salads for a while! I still LOVE jar salads as a method of prepping salad for your lunch, but I was having a hard time hitting my protein goals with the salads. Plus, honestly, I’ve been eating salads for lunch almost every day for over 2 years. I think it is time for a break!

As for the snacks, well….I forgot to take my usual photo! So here is a collage shot of all of my different snacks throughout the week! I think my favorite is probably still my grapes, chicken and cheese.

Now for our main dishes! I made 3 overall this week, 2 for Draz and I to have and one that was specifically for me to have for my work lunches. Overall, everything turned out wonderful! For the both of us: Slow Cooker Italian Red Pepper Chicken and Healthy Kung Pao Chicken. For Draz’s servings, I paired it with jasmine rice. Mine I served over steamed cauliflower rice! Both of these dishes turned out wonderful, though I think my favorite for the week was the Kung Pao Chicken. The one change I would make for next time – doubling the sauce for the Kung Pao Chicken! I love things to be a little more saucy and there wasn’t nearly enough with a large serving of cauliflower rice 🙂

For my lunch dish, a new recipe this week – One Pan Roasted Chicken and Vegetables. Funny thing…I actually originally intended to make this with green beans, a bit of bell pepper and sweet potato for the veggies. Only to get started with the cooking and realize that I was out of sweet potatoes! So instead, I ended up with more bell pepper and some onion. It was very good nonetheless, but next time I would definitely love to add sweet potatoes to the mix!

Here is the macros breakdown for this week’s main dishes!

Want to make this for yourself? Get your free downloadable grocery list for the main dishes here!

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Do you follow a particular practice for your food, like IIFYM? Have you had to make changes to your meal prep to make it work better for you? I would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below!

I know it’s been a couple of week’s since you have really heard from me. Things have been changing a lot here and it’s kinda thrown my schedule into chaos. And if you’ve been here with me for long, you know how much I thrive on routine! But things are finally settling down here and falling into a new routine, so hopefully I won’t have any more long absences anytime soon!

Even with the chaos of the past few weeks, meal prep has been one of the main things that has helped me to keep the changes from becoming too overwhelming. I don’t always do well with rapid change, but knowing that I had our food ready and easy for us to grab helped a lot! This week’s meal prep was no different, with it’s high protein snacks and filling main dishes. Enjoy!!

Along with all the changes that have been going on for me personally, I made some changes to my snacks as well! With a focus on them being filling and full of protein, I added in some rotisserie chicken lunchmeat with my grapes and cheese for my first snack of the day. For my second one, celery with peanut butter!

This is actually the second week that I have done these new snacks and I’m really liking them. Hard-boiled eggs, a couple types of protein balls finish out the snacks and I also made a big back of our breakfast burritos and some mason jar salads inspired by this recipe!

I have learned one thing though, when it came to my celery snack. All over Pinterest you can see portable snacks and one of those is celery in a small mason jar with peanut butter already at the bottom. The first week I made these I gave that a try….did NOT work well for me haha. It was very difficult to really dip the celery in the peanut butter and made for more frustration than the snack is worth.

This week, I put the celery in the mason jars again, but just for ease of storage. I put a couple of tablespoons of peanut butter in tiny containers. Then I grabbed one of those each day along with our other food. It worked so much better! So while this does create a little more dishes, it’s well worth it in my opinion.

Out of the 3, the Enchiladas take the most work, but the flavor makes them well worth it! If you like this one like we do, you can cut down on the time it takes in the future by making a larger batch of shredded chicken. You can then freezing it into the amounts you need for this recipe! I like seasoning mine with some cumin, paprika and chili powder and slow cooking a big batch to shred. Tastes delicious and really cuts down on the time and dishes for making it in the future.

Hey everyone! I hope you are having a lovely weekend! This has kinda been a weird and hectic week for me, so I’m glad that I kept meal prep pretty simple. With trying to get used to my new schedule and preparing for upcoming markets, I’ve been pretty busy here. This hearty and healthy meal prep definitely helped me keep on track while I was on the go!

That’s it for this week! Sorry for this one being so brief, but I’m honestly still pretty exhausted from the market yesterday. This week’s meal prep definitely helped me get through the craziness though. How has meal prep helped your life lately? I would love to hear about it, so please leave a comment below!